How did a program that enjoyed complete dominance of desktop publishing become a bit player? —

How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

In the early '90s, Quark boasted 95% market share. In '99, InDesign arrived...

Grep support for find/replace

This may seem really nerdy, but for productions that have people who write AppleScripts to deal with issues, having a powerful Unix regular expression text tool like grep solves a lot of problems. The above apostrophe find/replace would be done with the grep pattern “l’.”, meaning “match l’ and any following character.” If you have an entire phonebook of mistyped phone numbers that appear at the end of the line, it's dead simple to fix with grep:

Enlarge/ Previewing the effects of my grep regular expression in the Patterns application. The "$" means "end of line" in grep.

The ability to open QuarkXPress files

This bit of reverse engineering didn’t work on later Quark documents, but most companies debating the switch were probably still on Quark 3 or 4. Output from those could be converted by InDesign. This ensured companies would lose a lot less time when migrating to Adobe's program.

Mac OS X support

Adobe knew this was a biggie, and it was way ahead with OS X support for InDesign.

Anti-aliasing of on-screen text

Considering this was the early 2000s, you got a much better feel for a printed page on a 1280x1024 screen with InDesign's anti-aliasing.

More text wrapping features and manually editable runarounds

The ability to tightly hone finicky runarounds was a big deal.

Nested style sheets

The value of this one also can't be overstated. It used a set of user-created rules to follow for things like formatted lists so you could do back-of-book content like indexes without manually setting each element:

All of the above is handled by one nested style sheet. If you made your living doing stuff like travel guides, this one feature alone was worth a year's salary and your firstborn.

Overprint preview and separations preview:

Previewing postscript overprints in InDesign CS—this would have been done by an expensive proof from your prepress house with QuarkXPress.

Since that could potentially put you over the ink limit for your paper—which causes smearing and can potentially break the paper on Web presses—InDesign CS also had an ink limit warning:

This was the beauty of InDesign CS: it gave you tons of creative tools, plus the technical tools to make sure you were within spec when trying those creative things. The stuff like nested stylesheets and grep gave you formulas to deal with repetitive tasks so you could spend more time being creative.

I know it seems excessive to cover this much of InDesign in an article about QuarkXPress—I probably look like an Adobe shill at this point—but it’s important to understand just how far ahead the competition was. This is the main reason Quark lost its dominant position in the print industry. To sum up how InDesign was received by big clients and how thoroughly it shamed QuarkXPress in every way, here is a lengthy quote from a former colleague of mine Denise "Ace" Williams who spent five years managing production for weekly newspapers that used Quark:

Quark 5 and OS9 was what we were used to, but it was pretty miserable. The things that stick out:

Restarting your computer and losing your unsaved work over software freezes was a regular part of your day. Like, many times a day.

We had all these crazy workarounds to achieve certain effects like drop shadows or change-and-repeat. It was all pretty rudimentary and hard to standardize across many designers in a department.

Shapes were pretty much a non-issue, so we had to do everything supplementary in Illustrator. Text and image display were awful. We printed to see what we were doing.

We were, of course, still importing images directly into boxes by browsing for files from Quark. [Quark only got drag and drop with version 8. Let me reiterate—8 as in “eight.” That’s not a typo.]

Those things are all quantifiable productivity sinks that should have been addressed in Quark 6, but Quark was so comfortable in its position of power that it missed its chance. It put out a mediocre release that forced everybody to upgrade just so they could have a few overdue meager enhancements like compatibility with OS X (for real, that was the big sell, as if it was a treat) and, I think, drag and drop image placement from a finder window. Maybe a drop shadow? The thing is, there could have been more, but nobody remembers stuff that doesn't impact their daily workflow. I think everyone who cared felt like they'd been disrespected by that release.

And then InDesign CS2 was released in 2004 or so, and I remember being at an AAN (Association of Alternative Newsmedia) conference in a room full of production managers from all over North America at a session comparing Quark 6 to the new InDesign. InDesign had so many beautiful, necessary features that it really felt like Adobe had locked users (like us, our people) in a room for a year until they came up with all the right ideas: stability, autosaves, shapes and paths, real image and type representation, drag-and-drop, customizable keyboard shortcuts, effects, repeats. All our habits had been supported and standardized and simplified.

We all actually got emotional. The room was nuts. The Quark reps were humiliated. It was so obvious that all this stuff was going to take the friction out of our departments, which sometimes moved up to 200 ads a day. I remember this PM from Brooklyn sitting beside me who grabbed my arm partway through the demo, and we actually held each other while we listened. CRAZY.

The thing is, the effort and risk of changing a whole company to a new piece of software is so great that that release still wouldn't have swayed us if Quark had actually done its job with Quark 6 and made a competitive update. But it didn't, and the time, job happiness, and financial implications of switching to CS2 were super crystal clear. Everybody did it.

I did it for the Santa Barbara Independent, and it was a months-long process of testing, file conversion preparation, and training to make sure that our conversion week wouldn't implode when it happened. But once you've switched, you're done. As Quark should have known in the first place, it's almost impossible to get people to go back again without a super compelling reason. Maybe they implemented all those awesome things in a later version, but we would never know.

That last line is really the clincher. Having lost its users who only begrudgingly endured it to begin with, Quark would never win them back with a few nice features because of the effort it takes to migrate publications.

The other factors in InDesign’s rise: Price and bundling

When I reviewed InDesign CS, I was also testing the waters to see if we would migrate our relatively simpler fashion magazine from QuarkXPress to InDesign. As if the feature set alone wasn’t enough to snag us, take a look at the prices back then:

Adding insult to injury, InDesign CS shipped with all the language features of QuarkXPress Passport. And things got even worse for Quark when, in 2003, you could get InDesign as part of the newly introduced Creative Suite Bundle, which as a publisher or graphic designer, you would have probably bought anyway for Photoshop and Illustrator. You were basically getting InDesign for free—it was a Trojan horse in the bundle box, and I think it really sealed the deal for people on the fence about the switch. The fall of Quark could just as easily read “the very smart business dealings of Adobe.”

A steady path to ruin

In the face of all this innovation and competitive pricing from Adobe, Quark blindly continued to charge too much for upgrades, pretending like nothing had changed. The company offered more meager upgrades at too-high prices and still charged a ridiculous amount for a multi-language version. For our mag, there was no Canadian English version of QuarkXPress ever. When I reviewed InDesign CS1, it also didn’t have one, but this support was eventually added—Adobe fought to win over every user with early versions of InDesign, and it showed. It took Quark until version 7 to add Opentype, Unicode support, PDF-X, and transparency. To repeat that: it took until 2006 for XPress to finally do transparency—without overprints or tricks that meant trips to a PostScript laser printer to see.

To be fair, QuarkXPress did have areas of strength. It had a lead on InDesign in terms of Web support and output. While InDesign stormed ahead with features that appealed to designers and art directors, Quark made a go at including Web features in XPress. The convergence of media was a no-brainer, and I knew of one art director who used Quark for both his magazine output and the Web version of his magazine.

But it was a kind of nuts-and-bolts addition that seemed hard to love for people who loved print. The Web at that time was not the sexy CSS and live-type beast it is now. Instead, InDesign succeeded at getting people excited by the improved and creative print design that you could do, not the fact that you could spit it out for the lesser medium that you begrudgingly knew would eventually put you out of business. I’m sure there were many designers that were excited by the Web, and I had enough time to learn to code and do some interactive Flash stuff. But if you’ve ever lovingly designed a gate-fold double 10-inch LP or leafed through the exquisite, multi-plate and custom-paper pages ofIDEA Magazine, it’s hard to get excited by the scratchy window of a jewel-cased CD. The Web was even less attractive in the early 2000s. So giving us features for the Web was a bit like handing an oil painter a box of Corel Painter. Telling them “this is the future” doesn’t make it suck any less compared to what you had before.

Quark also clearly avoided features that treaded the same ground as InDesign, which the company probably thought would confirm its status as the more full-featured program. So Quark 8’s new tools focused on trying to tie press workflows to user workflows to eliminate the need for preflighting, but it was a complicated process that, if you tried to use on a regular basis, would have distracted you by false positives while you should just be doing layouts with decent tools.

InDesign Creative Cloud: Echoes of Quark

All this love for InDesign could be read as a ringing endorsement for the current versions of Adobe’s flagship layout program, but that’s definitely not the case. InDesign is not perfect, and Adobe’s abysmal Creative Cloud license policy has really shown the company's true colors when it comes to exploiting monopoly.

With my main magazine contract, we tried to make the switch from InDesign CS5 to CS6 because we, like everyone else, wanted to avoid hooking up to the great wallet-milking machine that is the Creative Cloud rental model. Quickly, it became clear that this couldn’t happen. The application crashed a ton when linking Incopy text, a problem reported in CS5.5. But Adobe apparently couldn’t have been bothered to fix it, and I’m sure it’s probably getting plenty of attention now that Adobe holds the keys to InDesign Creative Cloud documents. Sound familiar? A leading company gets too comfortable and stops paying attention. The shoe is apparently on the other foot now. Like the XPress days of yore, our publication is using InDesign (CS5) to avoid a company's cash-grab. Adding insult to injury, today's InDesign still lacks an alien that can zap my text boxes with flair:

Those last QuarkXPress holdouts don’t seem so shortsighted these days. Unless Adobe changes its path of user neglect and profit at all costs, some of us could be joining forces with the aliens yet again. Hopefully, QuarkXPress’ demise is one big lesson that all software publishers, no matter how dominant, have internalized: listen to your users and respect them.

Promoted Comments

From what I remember, one of the reasons Quark took so long to port to OSX was that they fired most of their in-house engineers and outsourced most of the development to India, where it languished in development hell for two years. A typical beancounter move that ended up costing them their monopoly

I'm not a designer, and never really spent any time in Quark or Adobe. But as the IT guy, I support a substantial (and excellent) team of DTP professinals.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned here, that had to help contribute to Quark's demise, is that Quark as a company were complete asshats to deal with.

I forgot all about this, probably repressing bad memories - but holy cow, if you somehow needed to reinstall Quark and misplaced a license key...well, it would be easier to pass an ammendment to the Constitution than to get help from Quark. They treated us like common criminals.

I remember the exact moment that Quark p*ssed me off so badly that it forced me to install Indesign for the first time. I mistakenly ordered another Quark seat for apps $800-ish, and mistakenly pressed "PC" instead of "Mac" on PCZone's website. Zone wouldn't fix it so I called Quark to return the unopened PC version for a Mac version but they would do nothing. No transfer, no refund, I was S.O.L. of $800. That pushed me over the edge to try Indesign, and I never looked back. I now owe Quark thanks, because as a printer and early adopter of Indesign, I personally helped dozens of my designer customers discover Indesign and switch from Quark. Adobe was a true partner company and we all made great businesses together….

…. until Adobe Creative Cloud. It's dejaVu all over again, where Quark and now Adobe customers feedback can be ignored. Adobe with CC has succeeded in p*ssing off former advocates so badly that it's a distasteful just to say Adobe. In one swoop they destroyed tens of thousands of users paid value in anyone's full paid CS6. (except for a slight discount for first year towards forever payments). This CC Adobe bundle of 20+ crap apps to create value, much like Corel tried to do unsuccessfully a decade earlier, is an insult.

Adobe has learned nothing. It doesn't get that people will run if not listened to. I don't know what is worse, Adobe's ridiculous attitude hoping this 'test' works out, or Quark still thinks they have a ray of hope in getting the band back together and having customers go back to them. Quark 10 is a joke. Both companies are disasters. Both game changers and reason to make people switch direction entirely.

Adobe is the new Quark. Both hated companies with well earned reputations.

I thought it was a bit disturbing that, starting in QXP 5, if you pressed the Cmd-Shift-K shortcut that invoked the robot five times in a row, a large, bulbous (and badly drawn) alien came from the right side, lifted a bazooka to his shoulder, and blew the little guy away. (On the PC, he melted the frame, as I recall.)

Anyhoo, all of that is to tell you that, actually, InDesign does contain an "answer" to the Quark robot. In the Print dialog box, create and save a print preset named Friendly Alien. The settings don't matter. Then, click in the thumbnail preview area at the lower left of the dialog box and watch what happens.

Much more civilized (and better drawn). Just wish it had a sound track.

I fell in love with InDesign when it was just a little beta caterpillar, before it took flight. Shoot, I've written entire books directly in InDesign, because I refuse to learn Word.